Josh Rosen shifted from tennis to football due to a shoulder injury as a 12-year-old.
Rosen views the way tennis players will lose points, games and sets even in victory as a way in helping him prepare to play football.
"The thing about tennis that helped me a lot was because of how many points you lose," he said. "[Even] if you beat someone, 6-0, 6-0, you're going to lose quite a couple of points … so you have to move on from lost points, because it's going to happen. You have to learn how to keep moving and pushing on."
Rosen was the No. 1 player in Southern California amongst 12 year olds and a top-50 player in the country.
“I was rehabbing for a long time and realized at that time it kind of wasn’t a sport I really loved,” Rosen said of tennis in a 2014 interview with CFB 24/7. “I had to get surgery or quit the sport, and after eight months of rehab going back and forth, I didn’t know if I loved the game as much as I did before.
"I ended up moving to football full-time, and it's worked out pretty well."
Some NFL coaches see a connection between the sports, if only a thin one.
"I can see the correlation there, no doubt," Chargers coach Anthony Lynn said. "There always seems to be common thing between tennis, quarterbacks and golfers. There's a hand-eye thing, something in the wrist movement that carries over. Usually, if you're a good tennis player, you're a good golfer. You're a good quarterback, you're a good golfer."
Said Houston Texans coach Bill O’Brien: “I’m not saying I watch a ton of tennis. But when you watch Wimbledon and see these tennis players and their ability to move side to side, attack the net, backpedal back to the baseline, it is a skill set as far as footwork goes that’s definitely transferable to football.”
